It's basically how I can moderate my own Facebook, I gave up trying to explain things to people I grew up around. I've had people freak out on me which was followed by their friends telling them how disapointed they are in them instead of admit they were wrong. The things my friend sees shared on his are actually hilarious, like apparently it's wrong to sing the national anthem in our public schools now in Canada but muslim prayer is okay ? The people who posts those things aren't intelligent enough to understand how wrong they are, you could stick them in a classroom full of students standing for the anthem and they would ask why you were there even though you explained it like 5 times.

And that is why no moderation leads to the weird kind of right wing, because they are more stubborn and loyal to their crap than leaf fans.

More importantly, liberal thought is about inclusion and expansion of values, while conservative thought is about protectionism and exclusion of threats.

Any conversation between the two schools of thought invariably devolves to what is or is not a threat and what is or is not a value which becomes "that thing you believe in? We need to keep it out" which pushes the conservatives into isolationism.

One friend of mine observes any time he can that the biggest booster of liberal thought is travel... while another friend of mine is a flight attendant who voted for Trump.

I think the right-wing bias we're seeing these days is due to the pervasiveness of Capitalism in our society. It's so ingrained in our culture that people take it for granted, and by extension take its tenets as obvious truth. Even a leftist is likely to have a worldview which is merely a variation of the axioms of Capitalism, a branch off of our cultural trunk.

When the cultural assumptions we all share are so deeply rooted in this ideology, it's very difficult to make a coherent argument against it without spending serious time and column inches trying to reframe the debate. Even reframing only works if your audience/interlocutors are willing to challenge their own assumptions and try to understand what you're trying to get across.

People get more conservative as they age. Ten years is a long time; if the same people on the same forum stay for that long there is bound to be a shift in politics. People I know on the "right" have become much more centrist, and people I know on the far, far left have started to moderate themselves and move toward the, I guess "not no wingnuttery-left" is the way you would call it. Not exactly a move to the right but more of a move to "I have all this life experience now and can see other people's opinions in a non insulting manner."

I'd be a lot more interested in seeing if there has a been a significant "staying around" of the old farts with 8-10 year old accounts on reddit. I bailed, deleted all my comments, killed my shitposting account and know of at least a good dozen other people I met when I started doing science outreach that don't bother with Reddit or deleted their accounts.

The thing I have noted in my life is that the radicals moderate and move to the center as they age. Black and white issues slip into veils of grey. Hard line positions that paint the enemy as an 'other' crack a bit as you meet more and more people. The exception to this rule is insular communities with minimal interactions with the out groups. This is also why religious and cult leaders are so desperate to keep the flock from being influenced by the outside. Hard to paint people as evil/other when you work and interact with them. There are dozens of ideas I had at 18-20 that came crashing headlong into the wall of adult reality, meeting people who had lived an experience that might have well as been in a movie.

"Maturation" is not the word I think we want to use here. I think that "experience" is a better fit.

Discourse will obviously be swayed by the inherent assumptions of a culture. The more participants are uncritically internalising those assumptions, the more those assumptions will become taken as unquestionable truth.

Most people do not question their baseline cultural assumptions, so when "most" people join a forum, why would the discourse not automatically turn more and more into an echo chamber?

This assumes that our culture is inherently right wing, which I personally believe is the case for the US. I've however never lived there.

From my perspective, Hubski is a dynamic hotbed of provocative discussion. But for several months, this has happened almost entirely in personal correspondence and not in public.

I would prefer to be more open, but a tiny number of vocal users tend to spice their intellectual disagreement with doses of condescension, mockery, and name-calling. While I recognize that these aspects do not diminish the strength of their ideas, it is sufficiently annoying that I prefer to keep out of public discussions.

Among the thousands of words I have excreted into public dialog, I hope very few of them were antagonistic toward another person, unsparing as I may have been in criticizing their ideas. I keep in touch with a couple of other former users, both scrupulously polite, who have quit the site after encountering needless hostility toward their non-Hubski-mainstream views. And I find myself always wishing that my favorite non-conforming users would expand more, rather than keeping to short, throwaway comments.

I don't think moderation can fix this, though I am still partial to my proposal. There is a kind of Gresham's Law in any open forum by which the bad (vitriol) drives out the good (civility). Nevertheless, Hubski is the best public discussion forum ever conceived.

Among the thousands of words I have excreted into public dialog, I hope very few of them were antagonistic toward another person, unsparing as I may have been in criticizing their ideas.

I don't think I've ever seen you be antagonistic towards a person, however you're pretty good at being a provocateur. Which, by the way, is something I admire about you. Please, do it out in the open. I promise, I won't make fun of you. I'll leave that for PM.

I have a dream that we could live in a version of America where we all believed different things about each other, but agreed that it was most important to be good and kind to each other first, and keep our opinions about the state of other peoples souls/bedrooms/genitals to ourselves.

A fairy tale where a true capital C Conservative Christian can think that his gay neighbors are doomed to eternal hellfire and damnation when they die, but treats them with respect when they are forced to see each other getting the mail or mowing the lawn.

Dan Carlin calls this the '1950's textbook vision of America' and it's the one I like the best.

I don't think moderation can fix this, though I am still partial to my proposal. There is a kind of Gresham's Law in any open forum by which the bad (vitriol) drives out the good (civility). Nevertheless, Hubski is the best public discussion forum ever conceived.

I would prefer to be more open, but a tiny number of vocal users tend to spice their intellectual disagreement with doses of condescension, mockery, and name-calling. While I recognize that these aspects do not diminish the strength of their ideas, it is sufficiently annoying that I prefer to keep out of public discussions.

I know sometimes I tend to get frustrated in some of the deeper conversations because I have a hard time clearly expressing my point and/or I'm more emotionally invested in a concept than I really have cause to. I very much try to keep it in check, sometimes fail, and always feel bad about it in retrospect. In fact, I remember a particular conversation between the two of us and the quality of Mustangs where I let things get to me.

So what I'm trying to say is, if I'm one of the users being referenced, I am aware, I'm sorry, and I'm sincerely trying to work on it.

Nah I've already called out the user in question. He was pissed but I think he got over it. But really it could be any one of us, myself included. Sometimes we just need to get called out for straying off topic and attacking the author and not the topic

If you associate racism bigotry sexism etc with right wing then I guess yes. Reason being that most people suffer from those isms from time to time but work hard at keeping them at bay. On a completely anonymous forum there is no need to suppress these urges and all the anti social tendencies spill out.